Pay to Play SItes. Are they A Good Idea

I'd rather they were cheaper, if you want my personal opinion, but all that aside, I was doing some stuff on voices.com. I wouldn't use it as a primary source of auditions, or any of the other sites, but it does help make that extra money...if you can land a gig, it's VERY competitive. If you got $50USD, give voices.com a shot for a month, and see how you like it, but be consistent as hell in the auditions and check everyday.

I've been a part of Voice Bunny for a little while before they had set up a questionnaire which claims they only allow 2% of the applicants to join. Voice Bunny has been dubbed 'the fast food' of voice over. Clients will expect an insanely short turnaround time (a couple of hours), often disregarding time zone differences and drop you for another voice actor who can do it faster. While there is no fee and you do get paid to audition, it is only if they find your audition acceptable, and will pay only $1 or $2. The actual pay itself for gigs is quite low for the amount of work needed done. It's really not worth it in my opinion.

Voice123 and Voices.com pays much better ($100 minimum). However, Voices.com takes 20% cut of your earnings while Voice123 does not. Both have a yearly membership fee of $400 (no monthly plan options from what I could find out). As Tom Freeman mentioned, North American gigs are much, much more competitive and you will have to audition like crazy.

While using a P2P can be useful with gaining experience and building your portfolio, it's best to network and market yourself instead. Just my two cents.

I discuss P2Ps a little bit in my stickied thread about getting into voiceover. I didn't discuss VoiceBunny in there since they don't charge a yearly fee, but I'll second Brittany Ann's comment about how their expectations are rather unreasonable as they want everything done SUPER FAST and for DIRT CHEAP, plus their quality requirements are insane. Rather than allowing the clients to determine whether, say, the tiniest bit of room echo is a dealbreaker or not (which many times is fine as they are going to be editing and mixing with music for an internal corporate video or something), their "QA managers" look for every reason they possibly can to say "nope, this isn't good enough." So very mediocre reads get through all the time by people who obviously lack VO training or experience, just because they can afford to shell out for a home studio. Meanwhile, people who are skilled and experienced and have a decent recording setup but not a full-on booth or studio get rejected because of the tiniest bit of echo or background hiss that you can only hear if you turn your headphones all the way up (simple noise reduction can easily fix that tiny bit of hiss but they say they don't allow noise reduction and you just need a "perfect" recording space from the start. You also aren't supposed to use USB mics, even though many people have been able to get good sound from them.)

The turnaround time expectations are a big part of why I dislike P2Ps. If they allowed 24 hours, it would be reasonable, but sites like VoiceBunny and Voices seem to expect you to turn in your audio within 4-6 hours, which isn't always feasible because of jobs and timezones. It also conditions clients to expect that they can pay crap rates and GET this crazy turnaround time, because there are enough people who are desperate enough for work that they WILL sit in front of their computer all day ready to jump on that $50 job the second it comes in. I don't disparage anyone for wanting to work, and I have some friends who do really well on sites like Voices, but it all depends if you're willing to "play the game". If you are a regularly working VO actor you probably don't need it and it's just going to cause you headaches.

I would also think that having to remain anonymous to the clients would really interfere with being credited properly in the finished projects. Or is this not the case?

I don't necessarily care about the exposure, but it does results in a lack of proof when you stick one of these jobs on your resume which is a pretty lame situation.

What I personally found about P2P sites is that different sites will be better or worse for you based on your voice and personality plus your needs and wants as a voice actor. However what's frustrating is to find out whether you like them or not you need to sign up and give them a good go but it can be expensive to do that.

For example I signed up to Voice123 for a year and knew very quickly that it wasn't going to be for me but then you're stuck with it for a year. It asked you all these questions about your voice, job types and everything and then would still send you so much irrelevant stuff (or not send you really relevant stuff); the rating system was bizarre and overall I had a frustrating experience on there (literally if you Google "reasons not to join Voice123" a detailed blog post I wrote about my experience on there comes top of the search results) but I also think a part of that was the fact I'm young and English - I don't think I was a good fit for there anyway. For a different voice type with different goals though, the site could be great and others have had good success on there, which is awesome.

I totally agree about the lack of proof being a pain too, something that has affected me. I have certainly found P2Ps to be a good way to get more experience and some nice money sometimes too. You just might need to invest and hope for the best to find out